Years ago, I had four office walls covered with wall size 25″x30″ yellow Post-It Notes and 3″x5″ yellow, pink, and blue Post-it Notes.
I was trying to understand a complicated operating problem.
Purchasing touched accounting.
Purchasing touched receiving.
Receiving affected inventory.
Inventory affected sales.
Suppliers affected almost all of it.
What surprised me wasn’t simply what I began seeing.
It was what happened when other people came into my office.
They read the walls.
Someone from another department would notice a connection and say, “So that’s why this keeps happening.”
Someone else would point to something and offer to take a piece of the problem.
Suppliers occasionally saw an issue and said, “We can help you with that.”
The walls gradually became more than a way for me to think.
They became a way for the business to see itself.
I’ve thought about that many times since.
A great deal of valuable information inside a business already exists.
The problem is that it’s scattered among people, departments, reports, conversations and systems.
Sometimes the opportunity isn’t acquiring more information.
It’s finding a better way to see what you already know.